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Supreme Court Paves Way for Rahul Gandhi's Return to Parliament; Health Ministry Wants to Lower Malnutrition Bar to Massage Numbers

Licence raj back in Digital India as computer imports curbed, agri funds for capital investment undisbursed, land subsidence in Dehradun after Joshimath, the ‘IELTS clear girl’ does murky business

Aug 4, 2023

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia and Tanweer Alam | With inputs from Kalrav Joshi | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal

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Snapshot of the day

August 4, 2023

Pratik Kanjilal

Questioning the trial court’s rationale for imposing the maximum sentence of two years on Rahul Gandhi after convicting him for criminal defamation earlier this year, the Supreme Court on Friday stayed the conviction (and thus the two-year sentence given him), effectively clearing the way for the Congress leader to return to parliament and avoid an eight-year disqualification period from electoral politics.

"The sentence for an offence punishable under Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code is maximum of two years of sentence or fine or both”, the three judge bench of Justices BR Gavai, PS Narasimha and Sanjay Kumar said. “The learned trial judge, in the order passed by him, has awarded the maximum sentence of two years. Except the admonition to the petitioner by this Court in a contempt proceeding, no other reason has been granted by the learned trial judge while imposing the maximum sentence of two years. It is to be noted that it is only on account of the maximum sentence of two years imposed by the learned trial judge that the provisions of Section 8(3) of the Representation of Peoples Act came into play. Had the sentence been a day lesser, then the provisions would not have been attracted.” (emphasis added)

With these words, the apex court has drawn attention to a key suspicion on everyone’s minds: that the trial judge seemed keener to have Rahul Gandhi kicked out of parliament than to merely convict him of defamation. At a press conference soo after, Gandhi said ‘truth always prevail’. His return to parliament will, however, not be automatic. There are procedures to be followed and plenty of scope for delay.

The Supreme Court, however, also said that Gandhi’s remarks in Kolar before the 2019 elections – for which the case was filed – were “not in good taste”. Gandhi had said, “I have a question. Why do all these thieves have Modi in their names whether it is Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi or Narendra Modi? We don’t know how many more such Modis will come out.”

Another apex court bench led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud has allowed a so-called survey of the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi by the Archaeologic Survey of India to continue. The mosque custodians say that this attempt to reopen the past is a reminder of what eventually happened in Ayodhya. “History has taught us something. What happened in December 1992, that raises suspicion and distrust at every step… The ASI survey intends to go into the history as to what happened 500 years ago. It would reopen wounds of past, Huzefa Ahmadi, representing the mosque committee said. "Let's not get into the past now," the bench responded.

Justice Rohit Deo of the Bombay High Court resigned on Friday saying he cannot work against his self-respect. He cited no reason. The judge’s most consequential recent order was his 2022 decision to discharge Prof Saibaba and others, convicted earlier on terrorism offences, on the grounds that the state had never applied its mind and granted the necessary sanction for prosecution as the anti-terror law stipulates. His judgment was stayed in an astonishing weekend hearing by a special bench set up Justice Uday Lalit when he was Chief Justice of India.

The Indian Express reports that before the video of women being paraded naked in Manipur on May 4 went viral, there were systematic attempts to delete it from the phone of Yumlembam Jiban, the 18-year-old who had shot it. It was finally deleted by the Meitei radical group Arambai Tenggol, but not before Jiban had shared it with his cousin. Both were arrested after the video forced the Union government to take action.

Reporting on the reaction to Ashoka University teacher Sabyasachi Das’s paper on electoral manipulation, Bloomberg recalls the suppression of NGOs in India, which the government has starved of funds.

The Home Ministry has withdrawn the FCRA clearance of UK NGO Save The Children’s Indian offshoot, Bal Raksha Bharat. Last year, it had done a fundraiser for child malnutrition. The Ministry of Women and Child Development had objected that the NGO was “misleading” people, because malnutrition is an issue “vigorously pursued” by the government.

Days after Russian President Vladimir Putin cleared the way by cancelling his visit to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, Indian PM Narendra Modi has agreed to attend. The India-Russia oil trade, which bypasses Western sanctions, could have become an issue if both leaders were present.

With just six sittings left in the monsoon session of Parliament, the Opposition and the BJP are trying to break the impasse ― the former wants a discussion on Manipur and the PM’s response on it, but the PM is playing hard to get. The INDIA alliance offers a middle path, a discussion under Rule 167, which permits voting, with a priorly agreed resolution.

More violence has been reported in Imphal and Bishnupur in Manipur, and arms seem to have been looted again. Day curfew has been re-imposed in the Imphal valley. Seventeen people were injured when force was used to disperse a mob moving towards a spot where the Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum had planned a mass burial of 35 tribals. The acting chief justice of the Manipur High Court had ordered status quo ante at the burial site at a 6 am hearing ― without any Kuki representatives present. The ITLF has deferred the mass burial till next week.

India has reiterated its stand that terrorism must cease before talks with Pakistan can be resumed. Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif had said days ago that Pakistan is “prepared to talk to them, provided that the neighbour is serious to talk [about] serious matters … because war is no more an option.”

The Rajya Sabha yesterday passed the Press and Registration Bill 2023 by a voice note. Introduced in the Upper House on Tuesday, the Bill proposes a simplified registration process for periodicals and provides for an appellate authority. It also removes punishments like imprisonment for minor offences. The Bill will replace the archaic Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867. Its statement of objects says that the 1867 Act was “procedurally cumbersome and complex making it extremely burdensome and time-consuming.” Additionally, its punitive fines and penalties “even for small contraventions was anachronistic to the constitutional values.”

Rs 812 crore was donated opaquely as political funding through electoral bonds in 10 days of July. Almost all of it was in packets worth crores.

Cipla shares are up on the news that Blackstone, the world’s biggest private equity fund, may make a bid for the promoter’s stake as early as next week. Cipla had signalled a willingness to sell only a week ago. If the deal goes through, Blackstone may acquire a majority stake in the company, which is noted for pharma activism. If the Hamied family, which started the company in 1935, is out, activism could also be over.

UK Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, who spoke forcefully on the Indian farmers’ issues last year, was stopped by immigration officials for two hours after he landed at Amritsar, allegedly because he was not carrying his Overseas Citizen of India card. Dhesi is on a personal visit and did not complain officially, but he tweeted that this was the price of speaking up for the farmers’ agitation of 2020-21.

Alishan Jafri traces the long arc of lynchings, hate speech and provocative videos which led up to the violence in Haryana.

The Railway Protection Force constable who shot dead four people in a train had an altercation with his superior, who was his first victim, but not with the three Muslims whom he also killed, eyewitnesses on the train are now confirming The shootings have spread fear among Muslims, and many families have decided to stop travelling by train.

Gujarat-born Moxila A Upadhyaya, who was appointed United States Magistrate Judge in September 2022, presided over Donald Trump’s appearance in a federal court in Washington, DC.

The “IELTS clear girl” is an object of desire in Punjab, reports Indian Express. Women do better at the standard English test required for student visas to the Commonwealth countries, and men contract marriages of convenience with them to acquire spouse visas, and pay their way in return. But of late, the families of brides have been elusive after taking their pound of flesh.

A skinny, lanky Sivaji Ganesan was fattened up on a special diet for his debut in the radical film Parasakthi (1952), which featured sharply political dialogues written by M Karunanidhi, says B Kolappan in The Hindu. The initial shoots provided slim pickings, so 6,000 feet of film was reshot after Sivaji was sufficiently victualled.

Stunted? Feeling low? Just lower the bar

In 2022, India ranked 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index in which it fared worse than all countries in South Asia barring Afghanistan. It also recorded the world’s highest child wasting rate. But in December last year, the Health Ministry had directed the Indian Council of Medical Research to develop ‘Indian’ standards for stunting in kids aged 0-18, rejecting WHO standards which take environmental factors into account, but not genetic factors. “A working paper released by the Economic Advisory Council to the PM (EAC-PM) estimated that setting new growth standards would bring down the proportion of stunted children under five years of age from 36% to about 24%.”

But healthy professionals object that lowering the bar would suggest that Indian children have a low genetic potential and therefore, their stunting would not require intervention. “Childhood stunting is one of the malnutrition indicators which makes its way to the Global Hunger Index and Sustainable Development Goals,” says The Wire.

Government curbs computer imports

On Thursday, the government imposed import restrictions on laptops, tablets and some computers with immediate effect for security reasons, and to promote atmanirbharta, which is old-school protectionism with a new name. This will curtail shipments from countries like China and Korea. A senior government official told PTI that there are a variety of reasons for imposing licensing restrictions but the first is “to ensure that the security of our citizens is fully safeguarded”. “Some of the hardware could potentially have security-related issues and could compromise sensitive and personal data, we have taken into account few of those goods,” he added.

Another government official told The Indian Express that the measure has been taken to push companies to manufacture locally in India. More than 75% of India’s $5.33 billion hardware imports in 2022-23 was from China. This protectionism is at odds with the government’s promotion of Digital India. Computers brought in as part of personal baggage by Indians returning from abroad will not be affected by the new rules, apparently.

Defence contractor sacks Indian for speaking in Hindi

A 78-year-old Indian-American engineer was fired by a missile defence contractor in Alabama for speaking in Hindi with his dying relative in India on a video call. In a lawsuit, Anil Varshney has accused Parsons Corporation of “unlawful discriminatory actions”. He says he was speaking to his dying brother-in-law in India when a colleague reported him for violating company and government “security regulations”. Parsons has denied the allegations: “Mr Varshney was terminated after several security violations, including using Facetime on his personal phone in a government-controlled worksite.”

In an interview with BBC, Varshney stated that he took precautions to ensure the absence of “classified materials or any content related to the US Missile Defence Agency or Parsons’ assignments” in his vicinity. His plea says that the company has ended “his career and life of service to MDA and the United States government.”

After Joshimath, land subsidence lower down in Dehradun

After land subsidence left hundreds of homes damaged in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, there are now similar reports from Dehradun, which is at a much lower altitude. Cracks in walls in courtyards have widened, posing a significant threat to the safety of residents of 25 buildings in Kalsi tehsil.

Kalsi Subdivisional Magistrate Yukta Mishra said that since house-building in the hills does not keep to standards, such cases are reported anyway during roadworks and in the rainy season. However, The New Indian Express says that land subsidence is to blame. Shamsher Singh Tomar, former village head of Khamroli village, told the newspaper, “During the 2013 disaster, some cracks were seen here, which have now widened. There is an atmosphere of panic among the people. There are many houses in the village which are on the verge of collapse.”

Agri funds undisbursed

Only 15% of the Rs 1 lakh crore Agriculture Infrastructure Fund (AIF), launched in 2020 to boost post-harvest infrastructure, has been distributed in the first three years. Its priorities include financing capital installations like primary processing centres, warehouses, custom hiring centres, logistics facilities, sorting and grading units, cold stores and cold chain, bio-stimulant production units and silos. Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar told Parliament that Rs 15,448 crore has been disbursed for 27,748 projects, with 9,660 crore completing 19,650 projects. The government plans third-party evaluations of completed projects to assess the AIF’s impact. The government is actively conducting programs to disburse the remaining funds by FY 2025-2026 and continue support till 2032-2033.

The Long Cable

Ashoka University’s response to its own faculty is democratic backsliding in academia

Deepanshu Mohan

A recent Twitter thread sharing key findings from a political economist’s paper, titled ‘Democratic Backsliding in World’s Largest Democracy’ is the eye of a storm erupting amongst academic circles (particularly social scientists) on social media.

The paper, an empirically tested methodological critique on the debate about democratic backsliding in India, provides damaging evidence against the party in power, while studying irregular electoral patterns in the 2019 general election. It asks whether these documented patterns were produced by electoral manipulation or precise control (i.e. defined by the party’s ability to precisely predict and affect victory margins through campaigning).

The author, Sabyasachi Das, an assistant professor of economics at Ashoka University, compiles new datasets providing statistical evidence for “electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies and is supportive of the precise control hypothesis”. According to the author, “electoral manipulation appears to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers”.

The paper provides statistically rigorous evidence of the following:

That the BJP had a disproportionate number of narrow victories in the 2019 Lok Sabha Election. Close polls are basically a toss-up: if parties put in equal effort, there is no reason for one party to win more such polls than others. Here, BJP wins more than any other party.
The two probable explanations for the above finding are (quoting MR Sharan here) are: “1) Precise control: BJP knows what elections are going to be close and works harder there. This is plausible and has been shown to be at work in other contexts. 2) Electoral manipulation: Party manipulates voter rolls, votes polled.”
The author explains why the precise control hypothesis doesn’t explain why the BJP won in many close election calls, as the National Election Survey (NES) of 2019 suggests that the BJP did not campaign more in places where they won by a close margin.
Das provides further evidence on how “voter rolls are manipulated” by showing that the growth rate in voters in 2014-19 is smaller in constituencies where the BJP wins narrowly, and it does so by deleting names (ie of Muslims) in these identified constituencies. There is also proof of turnout manipulation, where a party can be observed deleting or changing votes while compromising the core integrity of EC’s electoral process.

This paper has caught the attention of almost every social scientist working on electoral studies or the political economy of Indian democracy. Some responses are academically warranted (asking about the methodology and the nature of findings, for instance), while some are not.

Ashoka University, where the author is affiliated as an academic faculty, released what can be considered as a poorly designed response.

A critic of the paper would have to argue (with coherent statistical evidence) that the author has either: a) the wrong data set, or b) his data doesn’t justify his statistical findings, or c) a statistical anomaly (as presented by the author) can be explained by something other than vote-rigging.

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But the criticism is plain, unscientific rhetoric aimed at discrediting either the scholarship or the scholar himself, which is now the standard response to any intellectual exercise that critiques or provides evidence against the political party in power.

A sound critique matters, because it poses tough questions to the Election Commission, which safeguards the electoral process underlying democracy. It also matters because it establishes the freedom of scientific research (and researchers) to test the findings of peers.

My principal concern here is the way in which the university itself, an elite, private education institution for the incubation and practice of “liberal thinking and critical reflection values”, has commented on Das’s work, without being asked to do so, or to say anything at all. It has distanced itself from a scientifically rigorous paper written by its own faculty, which merits greater dissemination and support.

Dani Rodrik, a leading economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, has written in support of the author, while responding to the university’s “poorly crafted statement”, which is “seemingly casting aspersion on the paper (not yet “peer-reviewed”) instead of supporting researchers’ academic freedom.”

It almost seems that the administration felt compelled to issue a statement distancing itself from its own faculty’s work- which has been circulating among academics in the social sciences and political science for review and peer-review for months.

The statement reflects quite poorly on Ashoka’s promise of nurturing creative autonomy and free liberal arts thinking. It’s an elite, private institution which is not dependent on the government for finances or administrative functioning. Imagine the situation in public institutions whose fiscal condition is very different (see here for a discussion on the state of academic freedom in India).

Given the current political climate, reduced academic freedom and the waning importance of core practices of democratic accountability in India, Sabyasachi Das’ act to write this paper and boldly defend and share it (it is open source) is a courageous act.

An institution which feels that it is okay to critique a person who acts with courage and conviction without providing any sound, coherent, logical and scientifically tested response to his paper’s findings, shows the dismal state of academic freedom and freedom of expression across Indian institutions. In this case, the university came out with a statement, but many educational institutions (including private ones), use other ways to silence those who critique the status quo, or investigate the truth about power.

Sabyasachi Das merits our intellectual support and his paper merits deeper reading and wider academic dissemination, including for the purpose of pursuing critical inquiry and methodological reference, instead of being subjected to ignorant dismissal.

(Deepanshu Mohan is associate professor of economics and director, Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University.)

Deep dive

An excerpt from A Plain, Blunt Man: The Essential Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, edited by Urvish Kothari, wherein Patel says that he does not think that “it will be possible to consider Hindustan a Hindu state.”

Prime number: 1365 + 703 + 301

In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh disclosed the quantum of vacancies in various prestigious civil services. The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) has 1,365 vacancies, while the Indian Police Service (IPS) has 703. Additionally, the Indian Forest Service (IFS) has 1,042 vacancies, and the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) has 301 vacancies.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

Scott R Stroud of the University of Texas at Austin writes of the tradition of American pragmatism that flowed to India, from John Dewey via his student BR Ambedkar, who was not only a political leader but also a philosopher.

People wonder what it must feel like to be a Muslim in India today. It would be instructive to ask what it feels like to be a Hindu, says Vir Sanghvi.

There is no evidence to support limited internet shutdowns, says Apar Gupta, but plenty of data to show the harm they can do. Indeed, the magnitude of the crisis in Manipur was concealed by the shutdown there.

Dalits are in the crosshairs of majoritarian politics, which simultaneously wants to coopt them and deny them the benefits of reservation, writes Ram Puniyani.
Nalin Mehta discusses four reasons why an Ashoka University scholar’s recent paper alleging ‘manipulation’ by the BJP in the 2019 elections overstates the evidence.
Harish Khare pays tribute to Achyut Yagnik, sociologist of modern Gujarat, who died on Friday.

Listen up

In Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India, Kiran Kumbhar delves into the evolution of medicine in India. Projit Bihari Mukharji, David Arnold, Ranjana Saha and Nandini Bhattacharya look at the interplay of folk and formal medicine, and the role of class in the development of the profession.

Watch out

In Manipur, tensions between the Meitei and Kuki communities have flared into a violent dispute over tribal rights. Deutsche Welle asks if the government is failing Manipur’s women.

Over and out

In the Guardian, Tom Hunt fries up beetroot leaves in besan for a chaat. Good idea ― it’s a spin on the fried spinach leaves sold in tea shops. But who in India, except the beetroot farmer, has ever seen a beetroot leaf?

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.